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A series of predictable events at the "Weir are we upside down Rogaine"

Not enough training, wrong shoe choice, early morning jobs for the mother-in-law and a lack of sleep led to a hard slog and early finish of an otherwise perfectly organised event.

Arriving at headquarters with plenty of time to get set up, we received our maps at 20:30 giving us nearly 1.5 hours to plan the perfect route. The maps were your standard rogaine map plus an orienteering map as an insert.

This made for interesting route choice. We decided to tackle the northern section of the course that contained the orienteering map. This section is a lot steeper than the southern side but offered more points to collect (not that this mattered in the end). What could possibly go wrong? That didn't take long to get answered. The hills got us sweating in no time and Kerrie's feet started to hurt pretty soon with her toes on fire on every downhill.

I made some pretty basic navigation mistakes (let's blame tiredness) going up a creek in the wrong direction and messing up number 100 checkpoint by dropping in at the wrong point. We finally stopped trying to get the 100 points as we ended up on all fours crawling up a steep hill through lantana. I felt karma had a lot to play in that one as we had sneakily found a checkpoint before, which a bunch of people were looking for and we didn't tell anyone. By this time we had spent just over 3 hours and were thinking that we had to cut our route short. Kerrie's feet were getting worse, but we made pretty good time finding the rest of the checkpoints on the way back to the hash house.

We arrived nearly 2 hours early realising that we could have done our original plan if it wasn't for sore feet and me being pretty zonked by tiredness. We were contemplating going out for some more points but decided to head home early instead, realising that we have a lot of work ahead of us to make it through the Rogue Raid in April.

Thanks to the organisers for making this another memorable, and educational, event.